Venezuela’s opposition published photos this weekend of men butchering a dead dog on the streets of Caracas, preparing the meat for cooking in a nation that has been forced to take increasingly extreme measures to avoid a famine.

The photos (warning: extremely graphic) show two men in Quinta Crespo, Caracas, standing on a street corner and butchering the body of a dog. A representative of Vente Venezuela, an opposition party that has taken a hard line against dialogue with the socialist regime, posted the photos online as proof of how rapid the decline of Venezuela’s society has been since Hugo Chávez dismantled the nation’s capitalist economy in the 2000s.

[u]“While the dictatorship gives away $5 million to the United States and others are considering governorships, Venezuelans are eating dogs,” Vente Venezuela coordinator Javier Chirinos said on Twitter, referring to the five million that dictator Nicolás Maduro has offered victims of Hurricane Harvey to generate goodwill with the international left.[/u]

“This is the result of 18 yeares of misery and socialist, and we have the responsibility to denounce it, but above all to do what is necessary to change it,” he continued. “To wait another year is to prolong hunger, allow more deaths, it is pain. How much more will we ask the people to withstand?”

Vente Venezuela, led by opposition leader María Corina Machado, has been the most vocal opponent of the opposition participating in upcoming gubernatorial and mayoral elections. The largest opposition coalition, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), has agreed to nominate candidates in the regional elections, angering many Venezuelan protesters and significantly damaging the morale of protesters that had taken to the streets on a daily basis since March. The MUD includes multiple member parties of the Socialist International.

Maduro’s regime most recently held elections on July 30. The technology company that provides Venezuela with the equipment to run elections announced that they had found evidence their equipment had been tampered with to increase the number of participants in that election. Machado and her supporters argue that, given the proof that Maduro’s regime had illegally doctored election results, any participation in government-run elections would legitimize their cheating.

Dogs are far from the only animals safe from starving Venezuelans. In August, zookeepers in Zulia state told reporters that local residents had begun stealing their animals for food. Among the most coveted targets were collared peccaries (a boar-like mammal) and buffalo.

“We assume that they were stolen with the intention of eating them,” a Zulia police officer confirmed.

Venezuela first officially declared that it had run out of food in February 2016, shortly after the MUD took over the National Assembly following a resounding electoral victory. Venezuelans had faced years of shortages of basic goods such as flour, vegetable oil, and milk, and Maduro imposed a ration system to limit distribution in 2014. Just like his predecessor Chávez, Maduro also imposed strict price controls on food and tampered with the market to such an extent that Venezuela became highly dependent on exports and extremely unproductive domestically. As a result, by 2017, many Venezuelans (an estimated 15 percent) had taken to eating food waste from industrial garbage dumps. Images of children digging through dumpsters for food have become increasingly common.

The average Venezuelan unintentionally lost 19 pounds in 2016, and most cannot procure three meals a day for themselves or their children.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

_________________The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.- misattributed to Alexis De Tocqueville

No representations made as to the accuracy of info in posted news articles or links

Maduro unveiled "Plan Rabbit" on Wednesday with his agriculture minister, Freddy Bernal, at a meeting that was broadcast on Periscope. (In the video, the announcement comes after the two-hour mark).

And

Quote:

"The rabbit isn't a pet, it's only two and a half kilos of meat," Bernal said smiling, with a few laughs around him. "Trump's attack against the Venezuelan people is an opportunity to revise and change cultural consumption patterns."

Maduro, grinning, cheered Bernal's talk, adding "The first part of Plan Rabbit moves forward!" He added that some rabbits have already been distributed to a few communities as part of a pilot project.

Later, from another, unidentified news source, I saw the following response from an unnamed opposition spokesman:

_________________The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.- misattributed to Alexis De Tocqueville

No representations made as to the accuracy of info in posted news articles or links

With its coffers empty and its financial moves restricted by U.S. sanctions, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government is facing a nightmarish scenario with the approach of Halloween, when a series of debt payments totaling more than $3.5 billion are due.

Analysts said the government will do everything possible to make the payments, even if it means further cuts in already reduced food imports, which would deepen shortages in a country where a majority of people cannot get three meals a day.

But a default cannot be ruled out because of the precarious state of the country’s finances, the low level of reserves and the reluctance of strategic allies like Russia and China to continue lending money to Venezuela

The Venezuelan government faces a string of small payments due this month, such as the $28 million owned by the state-owned Caracas electricity company.

“The truly hellish week will come around Halloween, the 27th, when they basically have to pay $1 billion and then Nov. 2, when they will have to pay another $1.2 billion,” said Russ Dallen, managing partner at Caracas Capital.

Holders of Venezuelan bonds already face an “existential crisis” because of doubts about the government’s ability to pay the $3.526 billion required over the next six weeks, added Antonio De La Cruz, executive director of the Inter American Trends consultancy.

Standard & Poor and Fitch already rank Venezuela as a country “with a high probability of default” in the next six months, because it lost most of its access to international credits as a result of sanctions imposed by the Trump administration that ban the sale of Venezuelan bonds in the United States.

De La Cruz predicted the government will do everything possible to avoid a default this year because Maduro and his aides are convinced that they will not be able to remain in power if they default.

“They need to push this off to 2018,” De La Cruz said. “For 2018, they expect a recovery in the price of oil and a drop in the debt burden, compared to what it was this year.”

Those two factors could generate an additional $11 billion cushion for the government and give it much more room for maneuvering.

De La Cruz said he would not be surprised to see Maduro make further cuts in imports, currently already at just over 20 percent of the $60 billion mark in 2012.

The cuts have already pushed millions of Venezuelans to the edge of famine, in a country where domestic production collapsed under the weight of a government long hostile to the private sector.

But the government could also decide to suspend all imports of food and medicine, De La Cruz added.

“They have demonstrated that they do not care about the well being of the people if it risks their hold on power,” he said.

The government has averted default in recent months because of timely loans from the Russian government, which so far has always seemed ready to provide the millions of dollars needed by its foundering Latin American ally.

But Dallen said he was not sure whether the Russians would be willing to come to the rescue again.

“The Russians are not very happy,” Dallen said, noting a report in June that Venezuela had failed to make a $1 billion payment due to Moscow.

One billion dollars may not look like much in the United States, but it’s a lot for Russia, said Dallen, who often consults with Washington officials on Venezuelan affairs.

The Russians may well be approaching the point of concluding that continuing to invest in Venezuela is too risky, he added.

Follow Antonio María Delgado on Twitter:@DelgadoAntonioM

Comrade Maduro is pissing off his Russian lifeline by failing to pay them back what they were owed.

This does not bode well for him (or for the Venezulean people in the short term). I think in the long term they would be better off without him and his bolivarian socialist government.

_________________The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.- misattributed to Alexis De Tocqueville

No representations made as to the accuracy of info in posted news articles or links

Venezuelan president chomps on an empanada while his country starvesNovember 3, 2017The president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, was caught sneaking a bite of an empanada during one of his compulsory all-media television ...Video

Venezuela, a nation spiraling into a humanitarian crisis, has missed a debt payment. It could soon face grim consequences.

The South American country defaulted on its debt, according to a statement issued Monday night by S&P Global Ratings. The agency said the 30-day grace period had expired for a payment that was due in October.

A debt default risks setting off a dangerous series of events that could exacerbate Venezuela's food and medical shortages.

f enough holders of a particular bond demand full and immediate repayment, it can prompt investors across all Venezuelan bonds to demand the same thing. Since Venezuela doesn't have the money to pay all its bondholders right now, investors would then be entitled to seize the country's assets -- primarily barrels of oil -- outside its borders.

Venezuela has no other meaningful income other than the oil it sells abroad. The government, meanwhile, has failed for years to ship in enough food and medicine for its citizens. As a result, Venezuelans are waiting hours in line to buy food and dying in hospitals that lack basic resources.

If investors seize the country's oil shipments, the food and medical shortages would worsen quickly.

"Then it's pandemonium," says Fernando Freijedo, an analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research firm. "The humanitarian crisis is already pretty dire ... it boggles the mind what could happen next."

It's not immediately clear what steps bondholders will take. Argentina went through a vaguely similar default, and its bondholders battled with the government for about 15 years until settling in 2016. Every case is different, though.

Venezuela and its state-run oil company, PDVSA, owe more than $60 billion just to bondholders. In total, the country owes far more: $196 billion, according to a paper published by the Harvard Law Roundtable and authored by lawyers Mark Walker and Richard Cooper.

Beyond bond payments, Venezuela owes money to China, Russia, oil service providers, U.S. airlines and many other entities. The nation's central bank only has $9.6 billion in reserves because it has slowly drained its bank account over the years to make payments.

The S&P default announcement Monday came after Venezuelan government officials met with bondholders in Caracas. The meeting was reportedly brief and offered no clarity on how the government plans to restructure its debt.

The Venezuelan government blames its debt woes -- and inability to pay -- on a longstanding "economic war" waged by the U.S. More recently, the Trump administration slapped financial sanctions on Venezuela and PDVSA, barring banks in the U.S. from trading or investing in any newly issued Venezuelan debt.

But experts say the socialist Venezuelan regime that has been in power since 1999 bears the brunt of the blame. It fixed -- or froze -- prices on everything from a cup of coffee to a tank of gas in an effort to make goods more affordable for the masses. For years, Venezuelan leaders also fixed the exchange rate for their currency, the bolivar.

Those moves were among the driving forces behind the food shortages. Farmers couldn't sell at low prices without going out of business because their cost of production was much higher. Importers also couldn't afford to ship in food, knowing they would have to sell at much lower prices than what they paid for at the port.

When food shortages grew worse, an illegal black market emerged where venders sold basic foods at vastly higher prices than the government's artificially low prices. Inflation soared, making the bolivar almost worthless.

One U.S. dollar currently buys more than 55,200 bolivars. At the beginning of the year, a dollar was worth about 3,200 bolivars, according to dolartoday.com, a website that tracks the unofficial rate that millions in Venezuela use to determine payments.

The International Monetary Fund predicts that inflation in Venezuela will hit 650% this year and 2,300% in 2018.

--This story has been updated to characterize Venezuela's government as socialist.

CNN:

Quote:

--This story has been updated to characterize Venezuela's government as socialist

Did that somehow slip by them when they first published the article?

_________________The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.- misattributed to Alexis De Tocqueville

No representations made as to the accuracy of info in posted news articles or links

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